“We have not arrived to explain, but to sing.” – Kim Stafford

“Music is amazing. There’s some metaphysical comfort where it allows you to be isolated and alone while telling you that you are not alone… truly, the only cure for sadness is to share it with someone else.” – Wayne Coyne

“Between thought and expression lies a lifetime.” Lou Reed

“I think it’s good if a song has more than one meaning. Maybe that kind of song can reach far more people.” – Syd Barret

“I say, as a singer grows older, his conception grows a little deeper, because he lives life and he understands what he is trying to say a little more. And I think this gives. If a singer tries to find out what’s happening in life, it gives him a better insight on telling the story of the song he is trying to sing.” – Sam Cooke

“It’s being here now that’s important. There’s no past and there’s no future. Time is a very misleading thing. All there is ever, is the now. We can gain experience from the past, but we can’t relive it; and we can hope for the future, but we don’t know if there is one.” – George Harrison

“If you end up with a boring miserable life because you listened to your mom, your dad, your teacher, your priest, or some guy on television telling you how to do your s**t, then you deserve it.” – Frank Zappa

“Before you go to sleep, do not forget to say thanks for everything good that has happened to you in the last 24 hours.” – Roy Orbison

“Without music, life would be a mistake.” – Friedrich Nietzsche

“The truth is not a popular fuckin’ commodity.” – Lydia Lunch from the Women of Rock Oral History Project Interview

“The virus was a hoax here until Trump got it.” – Chris Stanley, president of The Villages Democratic Club, 55+ Community in Florida

“I cannot tell the truth about anything unless I confess being a student, growing and learning something new every day. The more I learn, the clearer my view of the world becomes.” – Sonia Sanchez

“Imagine what a harmonious world it could be if every single person, both young and old, shared a little of what he is good at doing.” – Quincy Jones

“Every time you state what you want or believe, you’re the first to hear it. It’s a message to both you and others about what you think is possible. Don’t put a ceiling on yourself.” – Oprah Winfrey

“Your head is a living forest full of songbirds.” —E. E. Cummings

“I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.” -Audre Lorde

“If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.” – Zora Neale Hurston

“Racism was stamped into America’s DNA. America is segregated, and so is pollution.” – Robert Bullard, co-chair of the National Black Environmental Justice Network.

“Politics is just the entertainment division of the military-industrial complex” – Frank Zappa.

“Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous ‘I don’t know.'”  – Wislawa Szymborska

“There are truths that one can only say after having won the right to say them.”  – Jean Cocteau

“Those who wish to sing find a song.” – Swedish Proverb

“Knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens.” – Jimi Hendrix

“Live for yourself and you will live in vain; live for others, and you will live again.” – Bob Marley

“Silence is required in order to hear the universe.” – Caroline Casey

“You must let suffering speak, if you want to hear the truth.” – Dr. Cornell West

“My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together.” – Desmond Tutu

“America, I have one question for you – if you are not healing, what are you doing?” – Bethany Sanchez

“The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between the lightning and the lightning bug, the lady and the ladybug.” ~ Mark Twain

“In a racist society, it is not enough to be non-racist, we must be antiracist.” -Angela Davis

“Cultivate the habit of being grateful for every good thing that comes to you, and to give thanks continuously. And because all things have contributed to your advancement, you should include all things in your gratitude.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Trees are poems that the earth writes upon the sky.” ~ Kahlil Gibran

“That’s one of the great things about music. You can sing a song to 85,000 people and they’ll sing it back for 85,000 different reasons.” —Dave Grohl

“how dare she ask for help has been the refrain on the lips of polite society when they glare in my general direction, and it pissed me off so much i wrote a book about it. :)” – Amanda Palmer

“You’re a dope if you don’t steal from everybody you have ever worked with.” Tom Hanks

“A problem well-stated is a problem half-solved.” Charles Kettering

“All I can do is remind people never to forget that artists have always been the canaries in the cultural coal mine, trying to sing humanity out of its darkest places. That sometimes singers walk into the darkness in order to show people the light. Our job — when we do it well — is to give a voice to the hidden complexities and strange griefs of this life.” ~ Amanda Palmer

“I sing on the shoulders of giants, and there will be more of us to come, following the road less written.” ~ Amanda Palmer

“However, my duty as a songwriter is not to try to save the world, but rather to save the soul of the world. This requires me to live my life on the other side of truth, beyond conviction and within uncertainty, where things make less sense, absurdity is a virtue and art rages and burns; where dogma is anathema, discourse is essential, doubt is an energy, magical thinking is not a crime and where possibility and potentiality rule.” — Nick Cave

“Fuck shame, make art.” ~ Amanda Palmer

“Being a musician is the highest level of humanity; the most sublime of all human services and the most blessed”. ~Ann Rutgurt

“You owe it to us all to get on with what you’re good at.” —poet W. H. Auden

“As I complete this photo project, I am learning that rape is not just an assault of the mind and body but also of the voice.” ~ Rosem Morton

“The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.” ~ Hannah Arendt

“My advice to you is to change your basic relationship to songwriting. You are not the ‘Great Creator’ of your songs, you are simply their servant, and the songs will come to you when you have adequately prepared yourself to receive them. They are not inside you, unable to get out; rather, they are outside of you, unable to get in. Songs, in my experience, are attracted to an open, playful and motivated mind. Throw my song away – it isn’t that good anyway – sit down, prepare yourself and write your own damn song. You are a songwriter. You have the entire world to save and very little time to do it. The song will find its way to you. If you don’t write it, someone else will. Is that what you want? If not, get to it.” ~Nick Cave

“A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.” ~ Maya Angelou

“The idea that a woman can be as powerful as a man is something that our society can’t deal with.” – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

“If there is one thing that a person needs from another human being, it’s to be appreciated, to be listened to, to be heard. Just as you are, not as I would make you” – Ram Dass

You don’t love someone for their looks, or their clothes, or for their fancy car, but because they sing a song only you can hear.  – Oscar Wilde

“Being a singer is a natural gift. It means I’m using to the highest degree possible the gift that God gave me to use. I’m happy with that.” ~ Aretha Franklin

“The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of  words.” – Philip K. Dick in his essay, “How to Build A Universe That  Won’t Fall Apart in Two Days.”

“The real secret of magic is that the world is made of words, and that if you know the words that the world is made  of, you can make of it whatever you wish.” – Terence McKenna

“Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.” –Robert Kennedy

“This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.” ― Walt Whitman

“If anything can happen, what wants to happen?” ~ Heather Bleasdell

“Writing is often a way to kill that part of me that wanted to kill all of me.” – James Altucher

“Hear no evil, speak no evil, and you won’t be invited to cocktail parties.” ~ Oscar Wilde

“There’s a blaze of light / In every word / It doesn’t matter which you heard / The holy or the broken Hallelujah”. ~ Leanord Cohen

They said these things because they love me and want to protect me from the pain and destruction of backlash, which can be just as bad or worse than the original offense. Women, often lacking in power, include this in their calculations when they decide to say nothing. Bizarrely, the same women are so powerful that their mere speech could cause infrastructure to collapse: careers and companies that have been built, friendships and families that are depended upon, religious institutions and their leaders who are meaningful to so many, sports teams that have devoted fans and income from advertisers, young men with promising futures, old men with legacies. Backlash is a mechanism to hold up infrastructure. – Jenny Listman

“You never sing the same song twice – if you sing it with all the same phrasing and melody, you’re failing your art.” – Billie Holiday

“See how much fun you can have by telling the lush, pulsating, up-to-the-minute truth with kindness and elegance.” – Rob Brezsny

“Use what talents you possess; the woods would be very silent if no birds sang there except those that sang best.” ~ Henry van Dyke

“Once, poets were magicians. Poets were strong, stronger than warriors or kings — stronger than old hapless gods. And they will be strong once again.”  ~ Greg Bear

“The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.” ~ V.S. Naipaul

May the slander, harm
And all forms of abuse
That anyone should direct towards me
Act as a cause of their enlightenment. – Shantideva

“Much of what was said did not matter, and that much of what mattered could not be said.” ~ Katherine Boo

“When in doubt, tell the truth.” ~ Mark Twain

“A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.” ~ Robert Frost

“There is something delicious about writing the first words of a story. You never quite know where they’ll take you.”  ~ Beatrix Potter

“And people tended not to bother a woman with a book.” ~ Cherie Priest

I imagine the possibility of helping to establish a tradition of uplifting gossip, full of praise and gratitude. What about, if instead of naming the shadowy aspects of our friends and acquaintances behind their backs, we identified, celebrated, and propitiated their divine glory and shining wonder?
Vow: I name the most beautiful truths about everyone I meet. I extol and congratulate. Cherish and cultivate. Quicken and animate. ~ Rob Brezsny, Free Will Astrology

“Talk between women friends is always therapy…” ~Jayne Anne Phillips

“Words like violence / break the silence…” ~ Depeche Mode

“It takes silence and slow time to be creative, and those things are threatening to most Americans, because they understand on some level that that’s what health is about, and that they don’t have it.” ~ Morris Berman

“Do not speak unless you can improve upon the silence.” ~ Quaker proverb

“I address you all tonight for who you truly are: wizards, mermaids, travelers, adventurers, and magicians. You are the true dreamers.” ~Brian Selznick

“When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape.” ~ Louise Erdrich

“No matter what people tell you, words and ideas can change the world.” ~ Robin Williams

“Frequently, people who go along a treasonous path do not know they are on a treasonous path until it is too late.” – John Brennan, former C.I.A Chief

“As a healer and counselor, I’ve learned that one of the most helpful things I can do for people is to simply listen to them attentively from that silent neutral still point within, where there is no bias or agenda, only openness and empathy. If I can do that first, then I can also respond from that place of peace within and truly be of assistance. – Geordie Numata, Deer Spirit Reiki

“Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do.” ~ Benjamin Spock

“Confront the dark parts of yourself, and work to banish them with illumination and forgiveness. Your willingness to wrestle with your demons will cause your angels to sing.” ~ August Wilson

“If you have the words, there’s always a chance that you’ll find the way.” ~ Seamus Heaney

“There is not a crime, there is not a dodge, there is not a trick, there is not a swindle, there is not a vice which does not live by secrecy.”  – Joseph Pulitzer

“If something is not beautiful, it is probably not true.” ~ John Keats

“The world is made up of language.” ~ Terence McKenna

“I believe that magic is art and that art, whether that’d be writing, music, sculpture or any other form is literally magic.” – Alan Moore

“You cannot be a Christian without living like a Christian.” ~ Pope Francis

“To survive, democracy needs a truly radical, truly independent press more than ever before. We need to create a culture in this country in which reading and resistance go hand-in-hand.”  –Howard Zinn

“Sometimes skulls are thick. Sometimes hearts are vacant. Sometimes words don’t work.”  ~ James J. Frey

“I tell my piano the things I used to tell you.” —Frédéric Chopin

“I would define, in brief, the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of beauty.”  ~ Edgar Allan Poe

“There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies.”  ~ Martin Luther King Jr.

“Written words can also sing.” ~ Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

“It is through stories that we weave reality.” – Paul Kingsnorth, The Dark Mountain Project

“It is hard, today, to imagine that the word of a poet was once feared by a king.” – The Dark Mountain Project

“But there is no Plan B and the bubble, it turns out, is where we have been living all the while. The bubble is that delusion of isolation under which we have laboured for so long. The bubble has cut us off from life on the only planet we have, or are ever likely to have. The bubble is civilisation.”  – The Dark Mountain Project

“The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.” ~ Muriel Rukeyser

“Don’t compromise yourself, you’re all you’ve got.” – Janis Joplin

“What a curious power words have.” ~ Tadeusz Borowski

I’m always pleased when somebody sings a song of mine. In fact, I never get over that initial rush of happiness when someone says they are going to sing a song of mine. I always like it . . . That song enters the world and it gets changed, like everything else — that’s OK as long as there are more authentic versions. But a good song, I think, will get changed. – Leonard Cohen

“It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.” – James Baldwin

If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it. ~ Elmore Leonard

“I teach self-reliance, the world’s most subversive practice. I teach people how to grow their own food, which is shockingly subversive. So, yes, it’s seditious. But it’s peaceful sedition.” – Bill Mollison

“I don’t think there is any truth. There are only points of view.” – Allen Ginsberg

“The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love and to be greater than our suffering.”  ~ Ben Okri

You’ve already got a younger generation that’s like “bring on the singularity.” The idea of it used to be a dystopian nightmare. But the trauma has already been erased. I think we have to kick back against it but I don’t even know how to. We all just suck it up and try to “swim with the tide but faster.” – Anohni

“There are always meaningful songs for somebody. People are doing their courting, people are finding their wives, people are making babies, people are washing their dishes, people are getting through the day, with songs that we may find insignificant. But their significance is affirmed by others. There’s always someone affirming the significance of a song by taking a woman into his arms or by getting through the night. That’s what dignifies the song. Songs don’t dignify human activity. Human activity dignifies the song.” – Leonard Cohen

“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.” ― Jack Kerouac

“Better a cruel truth than a comfortable delusion.”  ~ Edward Abbey

“Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.” ~ George Bernard Shaw

“The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.”  ~ V.S. Naipaul

“None of us can ever express the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked petal on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.” – from Madame Bovary by Gustav Flaubert

“To live and let live, without clamor for distinction or recognition . . . to write truth first on the tablet of one’s own heart – this is the sanity and perfection of living, and my human ideal.” ~ Mary Baker Eddy

“I do not know the truth, or I do not know how to tell the truth. All I have are stories, night thoughts, the sudden convictions that uncertainty spawns.” – Anne Enright, The Gathering

“You are song, a wished-for song.”- Rumi

“Try not to become a man of success. Rather become a man of value.”
— Albert Einstein

“Puritanism hangs heavily on American literature . . . The French were able to produce very beautiful erotic writing because there was no puritan taboo, and the best writers would turn to erotic writing without the feeling that sensuality was something to be ashamed of and treated with contempt.” (2nd chakra and the 5th chakra) Anias Nin from
Eroticism in Women, Playgirl, April 1974.

“Power lies in reason, resolution, and truth. No matter how long the tyrant endures, he will be the loser at the end.” ― Khalil Gibran

“And now let us play our reeds together…” ― Khalil Gibran

“Music is the language of the spirit. It opens the secret of life bringing peace, abolishing strife.” ― Khalil Gibran

“My Soul gave me good counsel, teaching me that the lamp which I carry does not belong to me, and the song that I sing was not generated from within me.” ― Khalil Gibran

“The Reality of The Other Person Lies Not In What He Reveals To You, But What He Cannot Reveal To You.
Therefore, If You Would Understand Him, Listen Not To What He Says, But Rather To What He Does Not Say.” ― Khalil Gibran

“You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts.” ― Khalil Gibran

“To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.” —Voltaire

“I sense the world might be more dreamlike, metaphorical, and poetic than we currently believe–but just as irrational as sympathetic magic when looked at in a typically scientific way. I wouldn’t be surprised if poetry–poetry in the broadest sense, in the sense of a world filled with metaphor, rhyme, and recurring patterns, shapes, and designs–is how the world works. The world isn’t logical, it’s a song.” David Byrne

“[What I want to communicate] doesn’t have a language with which I can communicate it. The things that I want to communicate are simply self-evident, emotional things. And the gifts of those things are that they bring both intellectual and emotional gifts — understanding. But I don’t really have a major message that I want to bring to the world through my music. The music can tell people everything they need to know about being human beings. It’s not my information, it’s not mine. I didn’t make it. I just discovered it.” — Jeff Buckley

“We have to create culture, don’t watch TV, don’t read magazines, don’t even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are now is the most immediate sector of your universe, and if you’re worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered, you’re giving it all away to icons, icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y. This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion, and what is real is you and your friends and your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears. And we are told ‘no’, we’re unimportant, we’re peripheral. ‘Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that.’ And then you’re a player, you don’t want to even play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that’s being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.” ― Terence McKenna

“To each there comes in their lifetime a special moment when they are figuratively tapped on the shoulder and offered the chance to do a very special thing, unique to them and fitted to their talents. What a tragedy if that moment finds them unprepared or unqualified for that which could have been their finest hour.” ― Winston Churchill

“When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape.” ~Louise Erdrich

“If you have the words, there’s always a chance that you’ll find the way.” ~ Seamus Heaney

“What is a poet? An unhappy man who in his breast harbors a deep anguish, but whose lips are so fashioned that the moans and cries passing over them are transformed into relishing music.” ~ Soren Kierkegaard

“Dance is the fastest, most direct route to the truth.” – Gabrielle Roth

“The reason we don’t want to judge someone is because it invites the least evolved part of them to play with the least evolved part of us, and it is just never pretty.” ~ Caroline Casey

“Choosing from fear transgresses our trust in Divine guidance.” Caroline Myss

“There’s nothing more advanced than relating with others. There’s nothing more advanced than communication—compassionate communication.” – Pena Chodron

Only in an open, nonjudgmental space can we acknowledge what we are feeling. Only in an open space where we’re not caught up in our own version of reality can we see and feel and hear  and feel who others really are, which allows us to be with them and communicate with them properly. – Pema Chodron

“Honesty without kindness, humor, and goodheartedness can be just mean.” – Pema Chodron

“Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak  whispers the o’er-fraught heart, and bids it break.” – William Shakespeare

“I was talking to somebody the other day, after 9/11, about getting back to normal. Odd. What is normal? And why would I want to get back to it? Maybe we have to change. Sometimes we have to destroy what we had.”  ~ Phillip Seymour Hoffman

“My job is to show folks there’s a lot of good music in this world, and if used right it may help to save the planet.” – Pete Seeger

“It ain’t what they call you, it’s what you answer to.”  ~ W.C. Fields

“The key to the future of the world is finding optimistic stories and letting them be known.” –Pete Seeger, 1919 – 2014

“When others asked the truth of me, I was convinced it was not the truth they wanted, but an illusion they could bear to live with.” ~ Anais Nin

“Had I not created my whole world, I would certainly have died in other people’s.” ~ Anais Nin

“When one is pretending the entire body revolts.” ~ Anais Nin

“If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don’t write, because our culture has no use for it.” ~ Anais Nin

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about the things that matter.”  ~ Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

“I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.”  ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

“I admire anybody who has the guts to write anything at all.” – E. B. White

“What is the source of our first suffering? It lies in the fact that we hesitated to speak. It was born in the moment when we accumulated silent things within us.” – Gaston Bachelard

“As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them.”  ~John F. Kennedy

“Singing teaches two skills that are essential for any creative process, the ability to listen and the ability to be flexible and spontaneous.”  ~ Rachel Bagby

“Once you listen to that still, small voice inside, and act upon the fluttering ideas/feelings/gut punches it sends your way, you will realize you have always been a part of that conversation about living. You know, the one about creating yourself; about polishing your inner life. The one about how love infuses every aspect of our lives with more and more light.”  ~Shavawn M. Berry 

“The further a society drifts from truth, the more it will hate those that speak it.”  – George Orwell

“Be a lamp to yourself. Be your own confidence. Hold on to the truth within yourself as to the only truth.” ~ Buddha

 “Every waking moment we talk to ourselves about the things we experience. Our self-talk, the thoughts we communicate to ourselves, in turn control the way we feel and act.”  ~ John Lembo

“I have been a seeker and I still am, but I stopped asking the books and the stars. I started listening to the teaching of my Soul.” ~ by Rumi

“Have good trust in yourself, not in the one that you think you should be, but in the One that you are.” ~ Taizan Maezumi

“I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.” ~Anne Frank

“The music is not in the notes, but in the silence between.” — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

“But to live forever all you gotta do is learn to sing” – Eyedea

“Writing is a struggle against silence.” – Carlos Fuentes

“You don’t have anything
if you don’t have the stories.”  – Leslie Marmon Silko

“Writers, artists, musicians… They are the shamans of the modern world.” —Peruvian shaman Arcani, from The Shaman in Stilettos by Anna Hunt

“If you want to sing out, sing out . . .” ~ Ruth Gordon in Harold and Maude

“Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.” ~ Alan Wilson Watts

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